Greetings Eric,

My experience with this is that you are better
off trying to put the grape in the ground & fence it off at
the bottom to keep the goats away. I don't know goats,
but I would guess a tube of hardware cloth with a 10 cm
diameter would suffice.

That said, I kept one alive for 2 years in a
half whiskey barrel, but it never got large enough to shade
an arbor.

Hope this helps,

--
Bob Mounger


eric wrote:

Hi folks,

I am hoping someone knowledgeable will be able to answer this
question. I am trying to grow a grape plant on my terrace one floor
above the ground to provide shade. I can't plant it down below because
the goats will whack it. So I am going to build a giant "flower pot"
out of bricks and cement on the terrace and fill it with earth and
compost and start from there to have it wend its way across the
trelisses I put up. My question is how much earth/soil do I need for a
viable plant? (expressed in cubic metres or yards)

The proposed size of the "flower pot" is 40cm X 40cm X 18Ocm giving
roughly 3 tenths of a cubic meter of soil area to root in. Would this
be enough to sustain the plant throughout its lifetime? presuming I'd
be feeding it from above with compost every year, as I would
ordinarily do in the garden...

thanks for reading this far,

eric